Double book review: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and Teach Yourself Go by Charles Matthews

This is quite late, since I read both books a while ago. But better late than never.

A Farewell to Arms was, well, not what I had been expecting. I've usually heard Hemingway associated with short, descriptive sentences. Straightforward. To the point. Terse. As soon as I started this book, I noticed that his writing, at least here, was the exact opposite of that. I found long, run-on sentences that consisted of seemingly disparate ideas. And because the narrator is an American in Italy, many of the characters early on are speaking in pidgin Italian, which Hemingway conveys by having the dialogue be in pidgin English. And it's just awkward.

But somehow I got into it. I can't comment too much on what makes the book good or how good it really is. I remember a lot of things happening, but none of the events stand out as that much more important than the others. There are parts that show the horrors of World War I and parts where the war might as well not be going on at all. But none of it really stands out as being impressive. Still, when the book was over, I could definitely say that I enjoyed it. So for me at least, this was a strange book.

But if there's one thing that A Farewell to Arms has going for it, that would be the characters. They're superbly written and make up for some of the other deficiencies. Overall, it's not a great book, but it's a good one.

I'm not completely positive as to how I should write the title for the other book. It seems to be Teach Yourself Go. The library had it in the system as just Go. The cover indicated that it's part of a series of "teach yourself" books, but I can't recall actually seeing any other books from the series. I picked it up because I found it on the shelf at work and it was the only book on the subject we had other than the one I'd already read. Unfortunately, the book was damaged and I almost brought it back for evaluation instead of checking it out. Once I got partway through, it became apparent that the damage was worse than I thought, so I did end up having it put on evaluation (and I'm guessing that it was weeded).

As for the content of the book though, I am disappointed. I wasn't expecting anything particularly awesome, but the only other go book I'd read was over a hundred years old and written by someone who wasn't actually good at the game. But this book ended up falling short for two reasons. Firstly, Arthur Smith was actually a good writer. I don't claim to be proficient enough in go or the history of the game to know how skilled of a player he was or how out-of-date his gameplay examples were, but he had a classy writing style of the sort rarely seen anymore. Secondly, Charles Matthews, while not a particularly bad writer, seems to prefer lots of pictures, but in a format that I find confusing. That was really the defining characteristic of this book when I read it: confusion. Following the examples, and there are lots of them, was very hit-and-miss. I think I did glean some useful information and maybe the book has made me a slightly better player. But I wouldn't want to use this to teach myself go if I were starting from scratch and if the lessons here are useful for people who already know how to play, they are probably already more skilled than I am (or just think differently).

One thing that might have helped and that I didn't do was playing out the scenarios and problems in the book using my board. I think I'd have comprehended almost all of them then. I might have even believed that this was a good book for improving at the game of go. But I had nowhere near the kind of time this would take. That's one reason I should probably try buying books on go instead of checking them out at the library. I don't know.

Also, I find it amusing that everyone has a different explanation of why the Occidental alphanumeric coordinate system for the go board is missing the letter "I." In this book, the explanation is seriously that Korschelt was German. This makes no sense, as the German alphabet does have "I" (they just pronounce it the way "E" is pronounced in the English alphabet).

So yeah, those are the last two books I finished. Still on the Cyberdreams anthology, which I may or may not review.